PART TEXAN ?

 

 

 

 

Although born in Texas I have spent very little of my life in the Lone Star State.  In the mid thirties my parents left the old country dirt farms in the middle of the state and moved on to start a different life.  It was bad anywhere you went as the USA was in the middle of the Great Depression but my dad got a job with a bridge building company and ended up working on the causeway between Houston and Galveston Island.  They moved to Galveston in 1936 and that is where I was born in 1937.  Dad took a mail order construction course and always bragged that "some went to Harvard, some went to Yale, but I got mine through the US Mail".  After finishing the school he landed a better job in Shreveport, Louisiana when I was nine months old.  We lived there a few years then came World War 11.  Dad joined the US Navy and served a period of time but was discharged at the end of the European Invasion.  As construction was non-existent there was no work in Shreveport  for him so we moved to Ft. Worth, Texas and lived some with relatives and then bought a small house.  When word came that building was picking up in Shreveport we moved back there.  I grew up in Shreveport but spent a lot of summers in Texas as just about all of our relatives lived there.

 

 

My dad on the left working on the causeway.

After graduating from high school I attended Abilene Christian College for a year.  In the summer of 1957 I married Billy Dan Kline.  We settled into married life for three months and then Uncle Sam called.  Billy was a ROTC graduate at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, Louisiana and received a 2nd Lt. commission in the US Air Force.  We were sent to Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas so I was a Texan again.  After the time in the service we moved back to Shreveport and remained there for the next thirty six years where we raised our family of four children. 

 

Business brought us to Branson, Missouri and that is where we have remained for the last twenty five years. 

 

I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Texas.  We still have more relatives there than any place else and therefore go back often for visits.  Guess I will always be Part Texan.

Love "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and keep some in my yard!